Month: October 2018

But Here’s What You Are NOT GOING TO DO This!

Firstly, I work on Long Island, as a school superintendent of the only K-12 charter school in Suffolk County. A quality education is a civil right.

Given the history of our school; the power of the teacher’s union on LI; and a total lack of knowledge and/or understanding of what school choice means, there’s a great deal of animus towards our school and the work that we do. We have accepted and embraced this, and vow to impact as many students and families as we can, as we get them on a path to college and beyond.

For those of you unfamiliar with Long Island, it is the epicenter of the Opt-out movement. The opt-out movement was designed for parents to allow their students to opt out of NY State tests. These tests were once mandatory.

The Evidence:

Moreover, there’s an idea being floated around by state officials, & Governor Cuomo that would tie teacher evaluations to their student’s performance on NY State exams (ingenious if you ask me). Accountability put suburbia in an uproar, thus creating one of the most successful campaigns of educational defiance of the past 10 years.

Exhibit A: A prominent school superintendent on Long Island writes a letter of reassurance to his principal regarding the school’s 2017-18 growth index scores. These scores tell you if a teacher is Highly Effective, Effective, Developing, & Ineffective (HEDI). To have a score of zero (HEDI) score leaves me at a lost for words. To have a superintendent that encourages this is also very telling as well. The level of entitlement that’s exuded in this correspondence is something that won’t be afforded to a leader of color.

More Evidence:

Exhibit B: The following is the level of proficiency of students from Tremont Elementary School in the 16-17 & 17-18 school years on the NY State Math exam. Given the 2017-18 NY State exams have now become the new benchmark, it’s unfair to compare the 2016-17 results to the 2017-18 results. However, based on this data set, twenty-eight students took the exam in 2018. One student out of the twenty-eight students who tested scored proficient. Seventeen students scored at a level one. Even though this is a minor glimpse of the overall performance of the school due to a high percentage of students opting out of the test, I don’t think anyone should be put up on a pedestal based on these results.

Here’s what we know:

We know kindergarten students from middle-class families, and upper middle-class families come to the table with different skill sets than kids that are the same age, but from a lower socioeconomic status (SES).

• We know that standardized tests are written in a manner that highlights the experiences of the middle and upper class, therefore immediately putting students with the lower (SES) in catch up mode, with the constant need for remediation.

• We also know “Children raised in homes with low income or low levels of parental education are at an increased risk of struggling academically in school” (e.g., Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Duncan & Murnane, 2011; Magnuson, 2007).

• We also know regardless of if you are for/against standardized testing, you can find reasons to substantiate your viewpoint.

Education as a Civil Rights Issue:

Quality education is a Civil Right. Some would say it is the single most important issue of our time. Pre & Post Brown v. Board, education for black and brown students was and still is inadequate. Funding formulas, nor allocated resources can make up for a system that was never designed for the disenfranchised to be successful. I don’t want to make this an issue about race, but I don’t know very many superintendents and/or principals of the minority persuasion that would be allowed to continue their employment with these results.

Teaching the Underserved:

Teaching in underserved communities is an Honor, a privilege if you will…

I’m sure there are many roles that we could have starred or co-starred in, but we chose to become educators (not by default) to make a difference in the lives of our students.

There’s a level of trust that exists in black and Latino communities that are unparalleled when it comes down to the respective parents hold for educators that interact and show interest in their scholars. A simple phone call home from a teacher to a parent still means something in these communities and can be the catalyst to change student behavior.

If No Change Occurs:

Even if the scholar’s behavior doesn’t change immediately, we (as educators) should never outright give up on our scholars or their parents. Lately, I’ve been seeing way too many adults throwing in the towel on our scholars and their families.

I tell all of my scholars’ parents that education today is extremely different then it was 25 years ago. The trust that our parents had in teachers isn’t the same trust that we should have in the teachers that teach our children. Why?

Teacher mindset is different. 25 years ago, teachers were optimistic and taught to make a difference in the lives of their scholars. Nowadays, we have educators that are simply unfit to teach our kids. Some of these teachers believe that they are doing us a favor by teaching our scholars. I am not, nor will I ever be okay with that sort of thinking.

It is an honor to teach in communities of the underserved. If you don’t feel this way, then you should not, under any circumstances accept placement in these types of schools. Is it challenging? Of course, but nothing in life that’s worth having will ever come easy. If teachers don’t feel a badge of honor making a difference in the lives of students, I want them far away from our scholars, because some of the damage that they unleash upon our kids, can never be undone.